Students have amongst the worst sleep of any group in society, which is especially ironic when you consider the importance of sleep for learning and creative thinking, and how much of both students are required to do. The ever-worsening situation has prompted the University of Manchester to install a Sleeping Pod into their university library. This follows a recent trend of on-campus sleep locations. In a piece out today on the Guardian Higher Education Network, I discuss the evidence around what might be termed the student sleep crisis, and the different types of responses that we are seeing around the world.

Many congratulations to our very own Anthony Bloxham, who has had his recent research study on how external stimuli are incorporated into dreams published in the International Journal of Dream Research (vol.7, no.2; p.129-140). The study, which uses an innovative mixed quantitative and qualitative technique called Q-methodology, looked at how semantically meaningful and non-meaningful auditory stimuli may be incorporated differently into people’s dreams when played while they are asleep. The study demonstrates that we are sensitive to the semantic content of sounds around us even while asleep.

Our very own Anthony Bloxham has been featured in a new article in the Wall Street Journal about lucid dreaming – the phenomenon of being able to control some of your dream content once you are aware that you are dreaming, but without waking up. Anthony is a seasoned lucid dreamer who took part in some innovative research by my colleague Dr Patrick Bourke and his dissertation student Hannah Shaw, who found that frequent lucid dreamers were better than average at cognitive problem-solving tasks. The full article can be HERE; it is free to access and well worth a read.

Does music help you sleep? That’s the central question in a new collaboration between the SaC lab and the fantastic Victoria Williamson of the University of Sheffield. Vicky is one of our leading music psychologists, and just back from a stint as Visiting Professor of Performance Science at the Hochschule Luzern (Switzerland). Her ground-breaking research on the secrets of earworms has been covered been widely, and Vicky’s expertise means she can be heard frequently on BBC radio and elsewhere talking about the psychology of music. You can read all about it in her excellent new book “You Are the Music“.

Many people like to listen to music while they fall asleep, a tradition which goes back at least 300 years. We are interested in just how widespread this is, and to that end we have just launched a brand new survey. It should take less 15 minutes to complete, and to show our appreciation for your kindness, we are offering the chance to win £100 of vouchers from a national retailer of your choice.